Monthly Archives: December 2011

So, I don’t know what to say about this video, except that it seems pretty cool, and it seems to espouse the multi-cultural, trans-national spirit of goodwill that we all ought to be embracing for these last few months before the Mayan Zombies come after us.

This was made for last year’s New Year by King Taro. The singer is Pita.

So, the official title of this is “Benedict Cumberbatch reads Kubla Khan,” but if you’re like me, you’re all, “Who the hell is Benedict Cumberbatch? That sounds like either a good way to ruin poached eggs, or some sort of sexually transmitted fungal infection.”

That’s the actor who plays Sherlock Holmes in the most recent incarnation from the BBC, Sherlock.

He’s also going to be playing the dragon Smaug in the upcoming Hobbit movies (via motion capture), and providing the voice for the Necromancer (aka Sauron). In those same movies, Bilbo Baggins will be played by Martin Freeman. Freeman also plays Watson opposite Cumberbatch’s Holmes.

So, I’m not a huge fan of Charles Bukowski’s poetry, but the dude wrote some awesome letters. This one was posted yesterday at Boing Boing. It is his response to a request to perform a poetry reading.

Just check out that last paragraph:

I’m working on my 2nd. novel now, THE POET, but I’m taking my time. They say it’s 101 [degrees] today. Fine then, I’m drinking coffee and rolling cigarettes and looking out at the hot baked street and a lady just walked by wiggling it in tight white pants, and we are not dead yet.

You read that in a letter and it is smoking-hot prose that makes you want to go get drunk with the guy. That’s a paragraph that could only be written by the coolest person you know. But somehow, his poetry all sounds exactly like that. And, for me at least, in the context of a “poem,” I would probably feel that it was trying to hard. Or, rather, trying too hard in some ways and not hard enough in others. Maybe it is the extra expectation that is placed on words when you call them a poem, or maybe the sense of deliberateness that it implies. I’m not sure.

I think when I read that paragraph as a spontaneous statement, it crackles, but if I assume that it is deliberately crafted art, the crackle goes away. It makes me wonder if it would seem as compelling if it were written in 2001, rather than 1971, using a word processor rather than a typewriter. Maybe even the typo in “degrees” is key in conveying the authenticity / spontaneity of the statement.

Anyway, Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing got the letter from the tumblr this isn’t happiness, which is full of cool stuff. If you don’t already follow it, you should. Here are just a few of many, many gems to be found there (arranged roughly from FTW to WTF):

So, a couple of weeks ago, the Economist ran an interesting article on Martin Luther and the Reformation, arguing that the social media of the day (inexpensive mass production of pamphlets) played a crucial role in fueling the spread of Luther’s ideas. It’s a fun read, full of interesting history, with parallels drawn to the Arab Spring revolutions throughout. It is also interesting how the tone of much of the discussion has not changed so much:

Sylvester Mazzolini defended the pope against Luther in his “Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Theses of Martin Luther”. He called Luther “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron” and dismissed his arguments on the basis of papal infallibility. Luther, who refused to let any challenge go unanswered, took a mere two days to produce his own pamphlet in response, giving as good as he got. “I am sorry now that I despised Tetzel,” he wrote. “Ridiculous as he was, he was more acute than you. You cite no scripture. You give no reasons.”

Snap!

Also circulated at the time was this political cartoon on the origin of monks, created and circulated by the pro-Lutherans. Spoiler alert: they were crapped out by demons.

Over at The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie has an interesting follow-up post on the topic. He points out that the role of cheap mass production of pamphlets in driving the Reformation is academically well established. He also makes interesting points about the role of the new printing technology in spreading the astronomical ideas of Copernicus and Kepler, as these sort-of hitchhiked on astrological pamphlets.

So, if you’re a Republican presidential candidate and former US Senator from Pennsylvania, you may have been feeling a bit plugged up in the polls. You have been hovering irregularly in the low single digits, seemingly obstructed by a gang of competitors.

But, finally, those low polling numbers have been evacuated.

The most recent CNN/Time/ORC poll in Iowa found that Santorum has surged to 16%.

Where in the World is Darwin Eats Cake is the regular feature where we look at Google Analytics to see where people have been visiting the comic from. We then put together some humor designed to appeal to those countries that have not ever visited. Previously, we have done Papua New Guinea and Bolivia.

There was an unfortunate episode during the period when the Darwin Eats Cake cast was camping out at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. In an effort to keep up production, I was forced to hire replacement characters, who put together an installment on Finland, despite the fact that we actually get a fair amount of traffic from there.

First, as of right now, Darwin Eats Cake has received visits from 126 different countries, but still a total of zero visits from Mongolia, Bolivia, and Papua New Guinea, combined.

Second, thanks go to Manduhai Buyandelger for consultation. However, she should be held in no way accountable for the offensive, stupid, or just unfunny bits here. Shit, maybe that’s the whole thing. Well, still thanks and apologies to Manduhai!

So, in the process of researching the upcoming Darwin Eats Cake, which is going to be featuring Mongolian humor – or, rather, Mongolian-inspired “humor” – I came across this. I’m not entirely sure what the joke is, but I think it relates to splicing in some presumably Italian dude into the video?

So, here’s a little bit of Christmas joy from South Korean boy band SHINee (샤이니). They’re like the Back Street Boys of Korea, or maybe the Spice Girls of Korea, or maybe the Harlem Globetrotters of Korea.